For the second time in two weeks a switch has died in the data center where superfrink.net DNS is hosted so the site is down. The first switch was a Cisco that had run for a few years. The recent switch is a Dell that currently does not even pass the power-on self tests.

The switch was replaced with another Dell. There might be BGP problems. There also seems to be a broken media converter (fiber to/from cat5 ethernet).

Journal RSS Added. It updates every four hours.

Server move scheduled for July 30th after business hours MDT.

It seems it has been a long time since this page was updated. There have been a couple programs added:

• A program that reads a list of Canadian postal codes and prints the latitude and longitude.
• A program to create a HTML index page with thumbnails from a directory of images.
• A program to automatically put my Gnome desktop images up on the web.

The Journal updates have been spotty since they started last year but frequent over the past couple weeks. I have been asked to add RSS for Journal entries but have no idea when it might happen.

Added book and programming links to the links page. Changed the colors on the news page to be default browser colors.

Added several book links to the links page. Removed a dead link. Finally changed the colors to be default browser colors and consistent with other pages on the site.

I am getting several bounce messages every day. Someone is sending spam claiming to be from some address at superfrink.net.

I really wish more people would start using Sender Policy Framework aka SPF. AOL.com uses it. hotmail.com uses it. gmail.com uses it. superfrink.net uses it. Are you using it?

"Google Project Two" is now online. This program searches via Google and generates a report containing email addresses and phone numbers found in the search results.

"Google Project One" has been changed to lower-case all words found. This means searches such as "Ray Bradbury" will count "stories" and "Stories" as one word. This means more distinct words are returned.

The project was also updated to not examine .pdf and .ppt files. There is no support to parse the PDF or power-point files. The ASCII strings in PDF files were being counted as words. This was adding junk words to the word count list.

A friend suggested a game could be built around Project One. The idea is people would guess which words will be returned by a search. Points would be assigned by the word count found by the search.

Added the Software Development section to the links page. This is something I have been interested in for a while.

I don't mean the collection of "software engineering" systems. Not that I don't want to see more reliable software and fewer bugs. What I mean instead is that I want to understand what allows some developers and teams to succeed while other teams fail.

(I want to be involved with success. I want to know how other people have gotten there and how other people have not.)

"Google Project One" is now accessible. It's a neat program. Type in a search term, click Search and wait a minute. The most common words found on the pages returned by Google are listed.

For a while the front page has had the SSH key fingerprint near the bottom.

I just read over the links page and have some additions and updates to make.

I have some ideas on customization in the works but not yet on paper. I have 48 lines on my TODO list. Plus my "pending" reading list. Plus the ten books on my desk which are not yet on my reading list. (I just counted them.) Plus the day to day things to be done.

I'm not sure where to find the time for everything I want. It is time to schedule some time to prioritize.

I also have reading to do for work. Incidentally I have a new job. I like it but I do not have any more spare time than before.

New server. Newer version of Slackware. Yay! I think the site and email is mostly working.
DNS now has a TXT record with my GPG finger print. MIT has a copy of my GPG public key on pgp.mit.edu.

Just playing along: litigious bastards.

What have I done this summer?

• I wrote a linux kernel and apache mod to make PHP files (all files served actually) run as the user who owns them. Of course root has to configure which UIDs can morph to which UIDs. The system uses a stack and morphing back is free. This is sort of like a setuid script but without forking a new process. Patches may be released (kernel 2.4.20, apache 1.3.27). If you're interested let me know.
• I found a bug in the 2.4.20 FAT32 driver.
• As for employment:
  • I modified my previous virtual server load balancing to work with many IP addresses mapped to many real web servers. (Previously written to support one "real" or "external" IP address.)
  • I worked out some improvements to a couple of keyword based search engines for images. The main change was to assign a value based on how many partial and full word maches there were. (eg "red car" vs "red cardinal")
  • I updated some credit card transactions (using payflow pro) in an existing PHP app and have been working on some PHP refactoring.
• I've started a little reasearch project on trust in a fact based system. The idea is if you have a list of facts (sentenial logic, ie no predicates yet) how do you decide which statements are deserving of more or less trust. After describing some of my (perl) code I was directed towards 3-SAT which is interesting, though right now I'm not so worried about complexity. I chose a postfix notation so I could use regular expressions and not have to build a parser (and parse trees). Off the top of my head a parse tree could allow for easier short cutting during statement evaluation. On the other hand I currently evaluate with one regex, a lookup function and, without a tree walk.

Recently added a bingo card analyser written in Scheme and genserv a C program that can turn any program into a network accessable application.

Cleaned up the INTJ page a bit. Also updated the Frink page with a siglog link.
My phil paper is not on Yahoo's search results anymore but this page (SF news) is number 4.   :)
(Yes I know banana's should be bananas.)

I've finally got around to adding information about the kernel patch I wrote to log signals sent between processes on Linux. The idea is just tap into the kill system call and log the signals sent via printk.

A couple of updates I thought I'd mention. I've added a treat to the main page if you are using Opera's Bork Browser.
I made a couple minor changes to the i386 linux System Call howto, just fixed some HTML so that #include <header.h> will show up correctly.

More interesting is that a couple of people (myself included) have gotten together to work on a website dedicated to our projects. This means it's a collaboration of scripts, programs, documents - well pretty much whatever we thought other people might find interesting. The site is www.thepurplebuffalo.net. There is a bit of overlap with files on this site but not much. Check it out!

Well SF.net is now number 12 on Yahoo's search for ' facts on banana's '. Yup I wondered how that happened too. Turns out my first philosophy paper is on the site and to illustrate a point I used the bananas sitting on my kitchen table.

After searching the web and usenet without success I've put together an elvis (vi) syntax highlighting file for PHP. I belive that vim already supported PHP but I prefer elvis and elvis is the default vi on Slackware.

Today I removed the mostly defunct stats page. The uptime, etc has been added to the main page.
A new page as been added the athenaeum where I can collect papers of interest in a single web accessible location.

Finally got around to looking at my Linux System Call intro. I've added some sample assembly code and started cleaning it up a bit. Also this weekend I acquired a couple more Ray Bradbury stories, Happy B-Day to me!   :)

I've fixed a couple of mistakes in a couple of documents ( basic debugging and account security ).
I've also added a quote generator to the main page.

Bah! The power died today for a few hours so the 15 minutes on the UPS wasn't quite enough. Yesterday the uptime was at 113 days! Thank goodness for ext3! I spent over an hour making sure machines were up and running. (Most of that time was spent dealing with a corrupt ext2 LVM filesystem.)

Well I had to change the IP of a database machine's interface today. I then spent a lot of time grepping PHP, perl and C code to find all the places where it had to change. Hope you don't end up in a position where you have to do such a thing.

Good news!! I've verified I will have all my degree requirements come the end of April! It's time to think about what to do with my life in 7 months. Of course I still have 7 months of coursework. ( Note to the curious: Yes I have been thinking. )

Tonight (this morning?) I also noticed the site had some traffic coming from the University of Kentucky. I think this is really neat! Then I got curious so I collected a couple of the interesting visitors.

One thing on my mental todo list is to start an archive of papers I've read with a few notes next about each. I've been reading as much as I can of late.

How could I almost forget? I took a personality test for a class. The results were shockingly accurate.

Superfrink.Net has now moved!

We are now running on new hardware at a new address. The old hardware is moving and will be used somewhere else.

On that note I'm moving too. I'll try to get superfrink's subdomains back up as soon as I can. School starts in a bit over a week and tomorrow is my last day at work. There seems to always be a shortage of time or maybe just so much to do.

Wow, last night we had lightning durring a snowstorm. Thats kind of rare, I think.
Power issues and so SuperFrink.Net was down again.

Added a SSL key (signed by myself) to superfrink.net. Your browser will complain, don't worry about it.   :)  
Update: HTTPS is being for another domain right now and plans look that way for a while. - frink - 29 oct 2002 Two purposes:
   - It's nice to prevent some plaintext traffic.
   - More importantly though ISPs should have a harder time caching.
While testing something I had stopped httpd but requests were still being served!

For the record (though if you were worried about monkey in the middle this can't be trusted anyway :)

        MD5 Fingerprint=C6:7A:E3:02:36:E7:89:64:47:48:D7:19:A1:7D:51:46
	SHA1 Fingerprint=D6:98:30:29:25:ED:8C:76:83:30:A5:FC:46:0C:73:87:70:55:D6:F5
      

SuperFrink.Net was down for a bit due to bad weather and power outages last night.
Several Net & Web companies around town had problems this morning.
We only had a few issues at work, it wasn't too bad.

I'm excited, NTPd is running now. On the down side it's now behind the time on my watch.
Rebooted to make sure it was happy. It must be run prior to changing security levels at boot time.

The network was unreachable for two hours this morning. Could be a problem with DHCP. We'll see.

SuperFrink.Net was found paused in bootup this afternoon. It appears to have experienced a power surge. I'll have to keep a close eye on it.   - frink

SuperFrink.Net was unreachable for a while today. There have been troubles with shaw.net for the past couple of weeks. The modem has been replaced. I'm told port cards in the router have been replaced. Still it dies and I don't get any replies when pinging the gateway. Oddly some arp-whohas requests have been comming through.
  - frink

Put up a link to the stats page. This is not an invite to haxor my box. This is an illustration of how often a random box on the net get's attacked by an IIS colour coded worm of the month. Right now it seems to be about two dozen per day.
  - frink

Apache is running now (HTTP only) and PHP4 seems to be working. SuperFrink.net is up on a 200Mhz Intel chip with 64Megs of RAM held together with a 4Gig IDE drive. I suspect the drive is dying. We'll see.   - frink